Red Squirrels

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Peel, because this debate has come just in time. Unless something is done now, we are going to lose the red squirrel completely. I think it was 86 years ago that Thorburn’s classic work on the mammals of Great Britain was able to describe the red squirrel as ““the Common Squirrel””, going on to say that it was very plentiful. At the same time there were three introductions on the American grey squirrel, saying that it was a pest because of its habit of barking trees; that it had no future in this country; and that the grey squirrel’s trouble was that it could survive only if it had a ready supply of deciduous trees and could not survive in a coniferous forest. During the war, however, most of our softwoods were devastated for pit props and all the demands of war. The red squirrel was losing its food supply and was at the mercy of the expanding population of the American grey. We must now look at the large areas of coniferous forest in Northumberland, Shropshire, Wales and Scotland to help save the red squirrel and to destroy the American grey. However, just to make it harder for the red squirrel, we now have the problem of the goshawk. The Reverend Mr Morris published A History of British Birds in 1857. The reverend gentleman went on to point out, without any question of political correctness, that the most favoured food of a goshawk was a squirrel. One of the best books on birds today, Field Guide to British Birds, describes the goshawk as a ““rare bird of passage””. In 1960 a few goshawks escaped from a falconry centre and some enthusiastic falconers followed that up by putting goshawk eggs in sparrowhawks’ nests in Kielder Forest. There is no evidence whatever of their having had a permit to carry that work out. We have the importation of goshawks but we also have an explosion in the buzzard population, and they feed on red squirrels. We need to encourage red squirrels and we need to come to an agreement to kill off buzzards, of which there is no shortage today. The Government have been most co-operative about cormorants in inland fisheries and I hope that they will consider extending the same co-operation to culling buzzards in areas where we want to see the squirrel population improve. So much of the suitable habitat for the red squirrel is in areas controlled by the Forestry Commission. I believe that the commission should have a wildlife officer who can deal with these matters. At the moment the emphasis of the commission seems to be entirely on public access but if we want to see the red squirrel survive, we need the co-operation of a proper wildlife officer in the Forestry Commission.